Pierre and the next morning he arrived with some of his mining equipment. A new chapter of terrestrial mystery opened. The fascination of discovery, where will it lead us?As the years were passing, they left a number of sad memories in my family. My parents and one of my brothers died in the seventies and in August of 1990 my husband died of cancer, after almost a year of a brave fight against it. It is for me impossible to convey my personal feeling of loss, so I enclose the funeral speech of Jerzy, the son of very close friends; which portrays faithfully my husband's personality.
For over a year I had not been able to come to the Bergerie and on my return there, a nice surprise welcomed me in the shape of a recovered cypress, planted by Staszek two years earlier. It had broken during his illness at a point of being tied to a stick. Now it was shooting upward, with all its little branches wrapped tightly around the stem.
Charlotte suffered a stroke and for a few years I lost contact with her, picking it up after she moved back to the countryside, unfortunately with much reduced mobility.
Liz decided to leave for far away Australia where was already established a big part of her family. I took an instant liking to her successors, Lora and Frederic, who fell in love with their Provencal house and were spending there most of the year with a few months absence abroad.
In 1998 Andrew married wonderful Lucinda, his superb life companion. On their way from honeymoon in Switzerland they stopped for a week in Provence. The welcoming gift in the Bergerie was a new bathroom in the second part of the house, from beginning known as Andrew's wing. It was now done by young and enthusiastic Vincent, because our dear Albino died two years after Staszek, also of cancer. For the newly wedded couple I prepared a grand reception, a second wedding almost, a festive happening in the garden, terminated by a charming poem composed for the occasion by Frederic.
Andrew was not yet fully recovered from an accident the happened one week before their wedding. They stopped for lunch at some friends on the way to another wedding and Andrew, always being high spirited, joined children on a swing from top of a tree. Suddenly the rope broke with Andrew crashing down. Lucinda was panic stricken seeing her future husband green and motionless on the ground. Fortunately, their wedding was not postponed and Andrew, strengthened by a number of injections was not showing any effect of having four broken ribs and a perforated lung. Only their honeymoon trip to the Galapagos islands and Peru had to be called off and they quietly took convalescence in the Alpine chalet belonging to very close friends of Lucinda's parents.
The happy event was overshadowed by a deluge in autumn, when during a heavy rain a stream of water appeared through the stone wall of the Bergerie and poured over the channel onto the floor. All day I was filling buckets, emptying them quickly outside, loosing the count after a hundred. Towards the evening he rain slowed and with it the stream, so after padding the floor with towels I slept soundly. In early morning strong knocking on the door woke me up and my color Pierre II walked in, with a declaration of action against the flood. With his enthusiasm he brought a sketch, describing the stages of necessary work and the telephone number of a builder with a digger. What a fantastic person, I thought. The digger arrived in the afternoon and started the excavation behind the wall, forming a ditch two meters wide till it reached the level of the floor on the other side of the wall. Pierre, a mining engineer by profession, wanted to find the source of the water and when the digger stopped against a solid block of rock we found it. About halfway along the fifteen meters long back wall of the building, the rock was touching the wall half a meter above the floor, transmitting the water to the inside. It took almost two days for workmen to flatten the rock with pneumatic drills and under Pierre's instructions we started the construction of a drain.
After checking my budget, the waterproof rendering of the wall was replaced by extra heavy plastic used for lining of swimming pools. The fixing of three meters wide rolls was difficult. Pierre brought with him two strong men, guests who came to him and Elisabeth to help in harvesting the olives. Luckily the weather was good, but the evening sun was setting early and I had to run along the ditch with a torch to show the fixing points. I was watching with amazement, feeling the truth in Pierre's remark: "to be a good color is not enough to exchange sweet words over the fence, but to be there when the situation needs you!"
Afterwards came the arrangement of the bottom of the trench, with half channels, protective sheeting, a layer of stones and the earth put into place by the digger. Pierre was working like Hercules, lifting and arranging big pieces of stones and I called him "Superman". A week later we celebrated the completion of the work with champagne at Pierre's and Elisabeth's house, among their guests.
The rear drainage had been in our mind from the time of buying the Bergerie, but since it was the boundary of the site we needed permission of the neighbors to do any excavation, which turned out to be difficult. It all changed when a few years ago we bought the land behind the Bergerie, consisting of nine terraces with old, half dead olive trees. I had no ambition to become a producer of olive oil, but since it is obligatory to clear 50 meters around any house as a precaution against fires ravaging the Provence every summer, with an electric bush clearer given to me by our visitors Zygmund and Magda I started to clear the wilderness, exposing wonderful forms of tree trunks with dramatically shaped roots and branches. Uncovering gave me enormous pleasure and I started naming them according to their shapes: Fortress, Arc of Alliance, Wailing Wall, Rock of Zion, and on the top terrace my favorite one: "The Captain's Bridge of the Argonauts". Equally beautiful were the terrace walls, marvels of dry stone masonry, incorporating existing rock formations, but at some places about to crumble.
On the uppermost terrace I had to use hand shears since the electric cable was too short, but then came Andrew with great energy, clearing the woods within 50 meters on the other side of the road, but terraces beyond this distance he would not touch. There I was helped by other kind neighbors. Then came Fernand, an authority on the cultivation of olives. He gave me the following instructions: "You must dig a meter wide ring around each tree, a minimum half meter deep and remove all parasite roots before applying some fertilizer". Well, I started working like a colonizer, with a pick axe in my hands, but with great satisfaction at the end of the day paying no attention to a slight back ache. The wild overgrown hill changed into a big stepped garden full of unusual sculptures of olive trees. Taken by the charm of that corner with an open view towards the south and a glimpse of the sea beyond the Esterel mountains, I was inspired to call my friends and neighbors for a full moon picnic in the olive grove, especially as it fell on 24 June, the day of St. John. Drinking and eating we waited for the moon to rise, using the magic illumination to recite poems in six different languages, standing on "the bridge". Almost at midnight, to help the moon to be better visible, we decided to cut two pine trees, at the same time liberating the nearest olives, which do not tolerate the neighborhood of pines.
On the terrace of our party there was also the ruin of some sort of stone shed, where I came across an arch at the bottom of a big rock in the corner. When a broomstick fell into a hole among the stones I got excited: and with determination, I removed stone upon stone during the following days, digging in the limited space with primitive tools. Finally I showed it to Pierre and the next morning he arrived with some of his mining equipment. A new chapter of terrestrial mystery opened. The fascination of discovery, where will it lead us?
During my sunny existence in Provence there were many wonderful moments, magic places and charming people of which I can revive but a few. Once, swimming in the large pool of some friends I heard the delicate tune of a violin, playing a sublime piece by Mendelssohn. I tried to stay invisible, motionless in the water, noticing a young man under an arch who produced this heavenly music with me as the only listener. At the end a face with enormous yes and the long hair tied as pony tail leaned over the edge of the pool and introduced himself. "Olivier". With emotion I said that this music was too great to be played to such a small audience, to which he replied: 'I shall play after tomorrow in the cathedral of Grasse". 'I will be there" I reacted. My neighbors, the music lovers Lora and Frederic, agreed to join me with a slight apprehension, but after the concert Frederic kissed my hand with gratitude. Olivier is one of the top violinists of France.
Among the people I know here, a very special one is Lucienne, a member of a provencal family and a person of great humanity, gentleness, good humor and common sense. She lives alone in a house behind the chapel of Notre Dame de la Rose, along a bamboo lined small river with a big water basin where Staszek used to study the movements of two enormous carps. There are a number of fruit trees, rows of raspberry bushes and various vegetables, the produce of which she liked to distribute among friends. She considered us one of them and at each visit we were returning with a car boot full of goods of the country, also with an occasional bottle of olive oil, with the request to Andrew to use it only in salads. "Never on a frying pan, dear doctor' she wrote on the label. To explain she told the story of olive growing, pointing at the golden liquid in the bottle. For twenty years she was helping her brother Fernand in cultivating the site, climbing from the village four kilometers almost every day, to attend to pruning, mowing, watering until the harvest. Picking the olives was done by hand, with the ones falling being collected on the ground on a net spread around each tree. There were several hundred trees and the harvest lasted sometimes from Christmas until Easter. The olives were taken to the village oil mill for pressing. It requires on average five kilos of olives for one liter of oil! This was the reason of Lucienne's great respect for the oil. Since then, driving though fields of olive trees stretching for miles along the road I see not only their beauty but also feel a great admiration towards their caretakers throughout the ages.
Finally, there is the intriguing case of the Mystery of the Templiers, which Charlotte came across in one of her books. We wanted to solve it and find the hiding place of their supposed treasure. The book was giving a quite detailed description of the location, referring to "little Brittany" in the neighborhood of the Gorges de Verdon. Charlotte was already after the stroke, but she could drive her specially adapted car and walk a little with a stick. We started the search and covered a lot of roads with no luck. One autumn Sunday, we invited Victoria, an ex-president of the Walking Club to join us, as she knew the most secret paths. The afternoon passed again without success, disappointed and cold we stopped by a roadside café. While my companions went into a nearby flour mill, I stood at its entrance looking inside, when a miller appeared with a white cap, asking: "What can I do for you, Madame?" Thoughtfully I answered: "You? Nothing monsieur, because I am looking for the spirit of King Arthur and his knights", to which his face enlightened. "You are familiar with the story?" he exclaimed, pulling me to the corner of the café, hiding from other people. After some hesitation he agreed to show the way to the place of mystery, King Arthur and treasure included, on condition of making the last hundred meters on foot. In first gear, Charlotte drove us across rocks, roots and streams before we reached a grass covered hill, encircled by the mountains of Verdon. There were no ruins in sight and in a setting sun, the emptiness of the area had a spooky atmosphere. The ladies gave me fifteen minutes to explore the top and Victoria, not much interested in mysteries, decided to walk back to the main road and look for mushrooms.
Almost running, I reached a big open plain with a few big trees and a crumbling chateau of three storeys with corner towers. A barking dog ran towards me when the heavy door opened and a tall man with silver hair appeared. This must be Monsieur André, the guardian of the castle, as mentioned by the miller. I ran towards him in relief, called if he was M. André, and when he confirmed, I threw myself at his neck with the joy of having arrived at the end of our long search. Because this solitary person is a philosopher, his thin figure in a long coat, his bearded face with most teeth missing, his long walking stick was for me the embodiment of my legendary heroes: King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, Don Quixote, the Templers and Veris, the hero of André's unusual books. But that is starting another chapter.
Created on ... September 27, 2003 by Pierre Ratcliffe